People arrive Wednesday at Lakeshore Tecnical College in Cleveland. / Photo by Bruce Halmo/Sheboygan Press Media

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Six instructors at Lakeshore Technical College were among the school’s 10 highest-paid employees last year — including one who earned nearly as much as the school’s president — after accumulating extra pay for additional teaching beyond their contracted workloads, according to a review of salary records.

Such compensation, called “overage pay,” is commonly used by technical schools to control expenses by using existing instructors in lieu of hiring and paying full benefits to additional staff.

As a result, the average pay for technical college instructors eclipsed that of the average University of Wisconsin professor last year, according to an analysis of 2011-12 salary data by Gannett Wisconsin Media.

At LTC, overage pay allowed economics instructor James Mani to earn an additional $61,303 on top of his $82,300 base salary, making him the school’s second highest earner — bringing in $478 less than LTC President Mike Lanser, who was paid $144,081.

Mani couldn’t be reached for comment, though LTC officials said several of the school’s largest overage amounts, including Mani’s, were mostly the result of faculty members providing on-site, customized training for area businesses that contracted with the school. In those cases, the company reimbursed the school for the instructor’s overage pay.

In Mani’s case, he was paid $54,900 for providing specialized training to businesses. The remainder of his overage pay was from teaching additional LTC courses beyond his normal workload.

LTC officials said companies will frequently request a specific instructor when seeking customized training, which was the case with Mani.

“He’s very well known in certain business and manufacturing realms,” said Kathy Kotajarvi, the school’s human resources director.

School officials said additional overage pay is incurred when instructors teach additional sections of a course, teach summer classes or take on other assignments at the school.

Kotajarvi said that it can be difficult to find adjunct faculty to teach daytime classes because most candidates already have other full-time jobs, so when additional class sections are offered it’s often added to an existing instructor’s workload.

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Overall, LTC ranks near the middle of the pack among Wisconsin’s technical colleges when it comes to overage pay.

The school’s 108 full-time instructors averaged $10,287 in overages, making it the sixth highest of the 16 campuses in the system but below the statewide average of $12,192. When factoring base salaries and overages, LTC instructors earned $82,311 on average, which was ninth highest in the state and below the statewide average of $89,831.

While the use of overage compensation remained significant at most technical colleges last year, overage pay is expected to drop since Act 10 reforms allow schools to extend the number of classes covered by base salary and decrease the amount paid for overage work.

Overages were far less significant last year at University of Wisconsin schools, with no professor receiving overages of more than $26,000.

At the University of Wisconsin-Sheboygan, the school paid a total of $34,338 in overages during the 2011-12 school year, compared to about $1.1 million at LTC.

The highest overage paid at UW-Sheboygan last year was to assistant professor Samuel Watson III, who was paid $15,953 in overages on top of his $51,907 salary, making him the school’s fifth highest-paid employee. Watson’s overage was the second highest amount paid to a single employee at any of the state’s 13 two-year UW campuses.

UW-Sheboygan spokeswoman Carrie Hoppe said those payments were for teaching winterim and summer session courses. In addition, Watson earned additional overage payments for teaching at other UW campuses.

Hoppe said the school pays overages for a variety of reasons, such as when a professor teaches during the winterim period between fall and spring semesters, or for teaching a continuing education course.

Professors can also earn additional pay, usually in the form of a stipend, for teaching an online course for the first time or developing one of their courses into a distance learning format, Hoppe said.

— Cindy Hodgson of the Herald Times Reporter in Manitowoc contributed to this story. Reach Josh Lintereur at 920-453-5147.